A Promise is a Promise
by moonswirl
Summary: Gleekathon, day five hundred and three:  sylvesters  Looking at the twelve of them up there, singing and crying, Sue comes to a realization


_Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 23rd cycle. Now cycle 24!_

_A/N: Couple days ago in story 500, I did a round up of titles for the Sunshine Girls series and I promised I'd do one for the Sylvesters as well, so here we are!_

Main Series  
The Sylvesters | With my little eye | The smell of failure | My girl in blue | Vitamin crash  
Sue's kid | Story time | And hair of gold | Oh captain, no captain | Always Family  
Back in play | Go, Izzy, go | Inside & Out | Mother made of steel | Kiss & Tell  
Unsee, Unsee, Unsee! | The morning sanity departed | What's the story, lobster girl? | A promise is a promise

Extras  
The Golden ring toss | I don't want to talk | Vigil for Joseph | What you don't know | The pink majestics  
The Sylvesters Vacation in Quebec / The Sylvesters Vacation in Hawaii / The Sylvesters Vacation in San Diego  
Mine to tell or not | One second chance | Story number one | Feel it in your bones | Family on break  
You know all my secrets | Bete Noire | A rose foreverafter | Comet | Belief enough for the both of us  
A diary decodes a daughter | Truth to tell or not

* * *

**"A Promise is a Promise"  
Sue & Brittany  
Sylvesters series #19 (sequel to "What's the Story, Lobster Girl?") **

Sue Sylvester basked in the glory of victory when she returned to McKinley. Her Cheerios had won their competition, the Glee Club had lost theirs… All was right in the world. She could hardly contain herself.

Still she could feel… something else. She couldn't give it a name, or really describe it… It was like she had swallowed something wrong, and it refused to dislodge, so… All she felt was this discomfort without end, and all she could do was feel it trickle down, so painfully slow that she wondered if it would be hours, or days, or months before it would leave her be. Later she might realize it was something of dread, of knowing there was something she had to see, but… she didn't want to, because when she did she would have to relinquish the bounce in her step.

As it was, that bounce had carried her past the auditorium doors and made her stop. The door was open, just a trace, just enough. She heard voices from inside, and even without song she knew who those voices belonged to, one in particular. It was only heard for a second or two, but it was enough for the-thing-in-her-throat to latch on… After one more moment just standing there, her feet had taken that initiative and carried her inside, to the shadows.

Up on that stage, there they all sat, lined up on stools, barely-brave faces… In the audience she could see Will's curly head among the empty seats. Even from so far back, she could feel the weighty emotions radiating off those kids… but she only had eyes for her girl, sitting among them. She hadn't seen her this upset since her grandfather had been in the hospital…

It was easy not to worry so much, if she was always so happy and carefree, but this… It was like a shot of ice snaking around her spine. She heard her words, all the time, about how she loved Glee Club, and how she didn't want to let it go, but Sue's response to this was that she might be bummed out for a time, a day or two at most, but then she'd realize her mother had done her a favor, and she'd forget about all this, return to her side where she belonged…

It wasn't until that moment that she really understood… everything. She saw it then… she was hurting her… her own daughter. She wasn't meaning to, she was just right in the middle, in the crossfire…

"_The right thing? Even if that turns out to be Glee Club staying?"_

All along Brittany's words had been stuck in her mind, and they could not be chased away. Sue knew that there would come a time, a peak before the rollercoaster took its dive into the unknown, when she would have to choose, when after all the machinations and the scheming would lead to a fork in the road. She'd expected it and dreaded it, and now here they were, and she had to decide.

What was the right thing? Who was it right for? As much as she could try to isolate Brittany's wellbeing in all this, the fact was she had become part of this unit, inseparable from a whole, and if she was going to be fair to her she had to be fair to all of them. Looking at them there, she had to face the fact, as much as she would hate to ever breathe the words, that in this case 'the right thing' was to make sure Glee Club got to stick around. And if she had to state the selfish reasons for doing it, which she couldn't deny existed, they boiled down to earning back the points she'd lost with her daughter.

When Mr. Schuester would announce to the club that they had another year, Brittany wouldn't realize what it meant at first but, after a healthy moment of contemplation, she had figured it out. She told Santana she would come by later, and then she hurried on home. When she got there, she ran around the house for a couple of minutes before wondering if maybe… She went to the basement, finding her mother rummaging through some cardboard boxes. Even if she knew they were alone, her reflex was to look around before she called… "Mom?" Sue startled a bit, closing the box before turning back. When she saw Brittany's face, smiling so bright again, her instincts were both to smile back and to go somewhere and cry… so her expression turned up somewhere in the middle.

"I didn't… I didn't hear you come in," she told her, moving toward the steps, where the blonde stood. After a moment, the girl walked down those last couple of steps, and she hugged her mother.

"Thank you," she spoke, giving a squeeze.

"For what?" Sue asked, taken by surprise, to the point where she'd forgotten the club would have learned of its salvation by now. "Right..." she spoke to herself, then looked back to Brittany.

"You kept your promise," Brittany smiled.

"Well of course I did," Sue gave her a nod, "What else would I do?"

"I don't know, I thought you'd find a way to make confetti canons portable or something," she shrugged. Sue was briefly distracted, with the image her daughter put in her mind, but then she looked back to her. "But this is better," she insisted.

"I told you, I'm always looking out for you," she reminded her, and it got another smile out of her. "You and me, we have to stick together, you know? You, and me, and your aunt…"

"And grandpa…" Brittany added.

"And grandpa," Sue repeated.

"Because we're all we've got…" Brittany did her own repeating, having heard it time and again. Sue just looked at her quietly. "Can I go to Santana's for dinner?" she asked, realizing maybe she had something planned, after this day they'd had…

"Sure, go ahead," Sue just shrugged.

After Brittany was gone, Sue went back to the boxes. They were nothing out of the ordinary, just… old memories. She may not have been the most 'in-tune' with those emotions most of the time, but after stepping in to give the Glee Club another chance, nostalgia had set in.

Was she going to end up losing her even more? At the time it had felt almost like the lesser of two evils… like she would have hated her if she'd let the club die and she would have lost her even more, but in letting her keep the club she had enabled her to keep getting further. Either way, Sue would lose… That feeling, plus everything that had been compelling her to strike at the Glee Club, might make her want to break this truce with Schuester, more likely than not. Now she knew this whole thing wasn't over, and she had to prepare for the idea that she had a lot more to lose than ever.

THE END


End file.
